The idea for my new non-fiction book, Nostradamus & The Third Antichrist: Napoleon, Hitler & ‘The One Still To Come’ [Watkins, March 2011] stemmed naturally from my work on the Complete Nostradamus. It occurred to me, whilst researching that book, that no one had attempted a distillation of all Nostradamus’s quatrains dealing with the Three Antichrists whose coming he predicted would foreshadow the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. In Christian eschatology [the study and science of the four last states – i.e. existence, death, judgement, heaven/hell], the coming of the third and last Antichrist [a false person who sets himself up as Christ] is seen as triggering the Parousia. Christ will then overthrow this final Antichrist, and, after presiding over the Last Judgement, He will usher in an age of peace and justice for all.

Nostradamus actually names and shames his first two Antichrists, Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler, with 47 quatrains in the case of Napoleon, and 30 in the case of Hitler. Nostradamus then goes on to give us 36 precursor quatrains detailing the birth, life, and long term effect of the Third Antichrist, who will be born, we are told, in 2035, in the Western part of Eastern Europe, following a conception which takes place just after the total eclipse of 20 March 2034. This allowed me the possibility, for the very first time, of constructing parallel birth charts for all three of the Antichrists, who between them notch up more than 100 out of Nostradamus’s grand total of 942 published quatrains. Interested readers will thus be able to compare three great tyrants from a unique historical perspective – that of the world’s most famous prognosticator, whose books have only been outsold by the Bible.